The only reason why I didn't start watching this earlier is because the first torrent I used to DL this series the file didn't want to dance with my bedroom television. I am a massive fan of the films (not YOU Hobbit!) and it was a rather instrumental part of my Christmas time with my family when I was in my 20's. All of us would hold off on seeing it so that we could all go to the theater together at our family gathering and then we would go to eat afterwards and talk about it. I come from a family of fantasy-nerds to it was actually a fantastic memory and one of my favorite parts about Christmas.
The Rings of Power had some controversy surrounding it because of apparent diversity quotas and while I have my own reservations about that, it had nothing to do with why I waited until now to switch it on.
Last night I watched the first 2 episodes and thus far I have to say that I am rather nonplussed about the entire production.
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I suppose they had some really big shoes to fill when they decided to take on one of the most beloved franchises of all time (again, not you Hobbit trilogy!) and the fans were always going to have problems with it, forced diversity or not.
The problem that I have with TROP up until the end of episode two is something that is quite simple: It's boring.
Another issue is that I feel like the music, which was absolutely epic in all the films including the horrible Hobbit films, just isn't very good in this series. One would think that if a BILLION dollars is being spent producing something that they would be able to recapture the magic that was the musical score in all of those films but in TROP, the music is not only not epic, but it seems rather out of place.
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Furthermore, I feel as though we are being introduced to far too many characters at once and a lot of them are quite annoying, such as the Hobbit girls who bicker and fuss all the time. I will admit that my dislike for this aspect of it has a lot to do with my general dislike for child actors but at the same time, there is a ton of irritating dialogue that goes on any time they are on screen.
I was watching rather intently, but after 2 hours of the show I can't recall the names of anyone that is in the show. I know their basic storylines but I simply can't remember any of their names.
Another gripe in my mind would be the fact that I believe that Amazon has gone down the usual series' role of having a certain number of episodes in mind before they even began filming and intentionally put a ton of filler in there in order to make every episode an hour long. Normally, I don't catch on to this until about the middle of the season, but in this case I am noticing it in the very beginning.
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For example, the rock-smashing competition that takes place between an elf and his dwarf friend he hasn't seen in 20 years or so, gets cut back to 3 times in the episode and at the end of it, the entire encounter had no bearing on the actual story anyway. While I am sure it wasn't easy to film a group of people smashing boulders that weren't actually there on the set, it just isn't entertaining. I was about to reach for my remote because I could tell pretty early on in this sequence that the outcome of whatever the hell they were doing was going to be immaterial anyway. As it turns out I was correct.
There are some pretty amazing scenes in as much as on-screen beauty and realism is concerned and with stuff like this happening so early in the series I suppose it is easy to understand how their budget ended up being so absurdly high to make the first season.
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In the end though, this entire sequence of events doesn't really result in a great deal happening other than bringing together of two characters whose arcs are almost certainly going to become a major part of the story. I can't possibly know this for sure because I have only seen the first two episodes, but it does seem rather telegraphed. I can only imagine how many millions of dollars they must have spent on getting this 10 minutes or so of filming done only to have the only outcome of it be that two previously unrelated characters team up and I can only guess, end up having some sort of forbidden love story take place between them.
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At the moment I can say that one of the only characters I consider to be interesting in the "meteor man" and I didn't look very long for the above picture because I don't want to stumble upon any spoilers about the character or the show at large.
For me, at least after 2 hours of watching it I am sad to report that I don't really have a great deal of enthusiasm about the remaining 6 episodes. It's weird to me that I have a dichotomy of too many things going on at once for it to be very interesting and I can only hope that there is some grand "meeting point" somewhere in the middle of the 8 episodes that makes this "mess" come together and become somewhat meaningful to the viewers. As it stands now I can kind of understand why this show wasn't talked about a great deal in the media and this is how I managed to get this far past the release date and I don't actually know about literally anything that happens in it.
Does it get better later? Well I certainly hope so. Because as of right now this seems like a completely crazy waste of money that I am glad I didn't actually pay to watch.